Year 2!
Daisypath Ticker

Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Un Anglais
My bedside companion for the moment. This is why I love reading.

Excerpts from:
The Mother Tongue (English & How It Got That Way)
by Bill Bryson

Chapter One. The World's Language

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.

Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: "The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway." Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: "When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor." Or these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: "Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch."

Clearly the writer of that message was not about to let a little ignorance of English stand in the way of a good meal. In fact, it would appear that one of the beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm---a willingness to tootle with vigor, as it were.

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for unwary foreigners. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth, that a person who says "I could care less" means the same thing as someone who says "I couldn't care less," that a sign in a store saying ALL ITEMS NOT ON SALE doesn't mean literally what it says (that every item is not on sale) but rather that only some of the items are on sale, that when a person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?"

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But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English---for better and worse---is its deceptive complexity. Nothing in English is ever quite what it seems. Take the simple word what. We use it everyday---indeed, every few sentences. But imagine trying to explain it to a foreigner what what means. It takes the Oxford English Dictionary five pages and almost 15,000 words to manage the task. As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them---often without having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify. What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or---if our feelings are less pronounced---just whelmed? Why do we say colonel as if it had an r in it? Why do we spell four with a u and forty without?

Answering these and other such questions is the main purpose of this book. But we start with perhaps the most enduring and mysterious question of all: Where does language come from in the first place?

 
posted by The White Rabbit at 8:48 AM | Permalink |


2 Speak Up, I Can't Hear You:


  • At 11:57 AM, Blogger Chrixean

    In the words of my favorite Pinoy comedian of all time, Rex Navarette:

    REX: Why do we say the GH in the word LAUGHTER with an F sound and not an H sound, since it's spelled with a GH? (He asks some smarty-pants white guy classmate of his named Nigel)"
    NIGEL: Because that is the correct way of saying the word laughter.
    REX: So what about MANSLAUGHTER? It has LAUGHTER in it! Can i be made guilty of MAN'S LAUGHTER?

    Hehe. :P

     

  • At 12:26 AM, Blogger ribbiticus

    other cases of english being lost in translation:
    1. when pepsi invaded the huge chinese market, the product's slogan. "come alive with the pepsi generation" became "pepsi brings back your dead ancestors"
    2. in a bangkok temple: it is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man
    3. in an acapulco hotel: the manager has personally passed all the water served here
    teeheehee :)

     
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